Daniele Spanò is a visual artist working across directing, set design and installation, creating environments in which video, light and sound form hybrid devices. Active since 2004, he develops multi-channel projects and exhibits in Italy and abroad, from the United States to Australia. Spanò’s latest project (Let me fall, on display at Sala 1 – Centro Internazionale d’Arte Contemporanea in Rome) explores the ambiguity that characterises images today, in an era in which the digital has saturated our gaze. The artist has focused two years of research on the theme of falling into a series of temporary devices: screens and sculptures reveal their vulnerability, sometimes deprived of their original function. Images are reduced to traces of light, presences that struggle to reveal themselves. The viewer is invited to move across a controlled void, where what remains unseen weighs more than what appears. Even when images seem to speak clearly, we know how manipulable and unstable they are. Images generated within algorithmic flows construct narratives that tap us without ever fully belonging to us. In this context, the fall exists both as an event and as a delta of possibilities: a way to make surrogate certainties collapse and let what remains emerge once the content disappears. Let me fall invites the viewer to navigate the shifting layers of reality with care, like tightrope walkers who find stability within instability.
Daniele Spanò, “Let me fall”, 2018, fine art print / giclée – color, 35 x 28 cm, courtesy of the artist
Chantal Gisi: How did the theme of falling emerge for you? Was it an intuition or a specific episode?
Daniele Spanò: The first image is a photograph taken in 2018, during a walk in a forest in Trentino-Alto Adige. In front of me there was a wounded landscape, marked by a clear line: a trace that separated the trees fallen to the ground and those still standing. From that experience a reflection on support came, which today appears in Trees. Over the years I have continued to explore this theme through video, installations and multimedia projects, constantly oscillating between fragility and balance. Falling may mean rising again and changing direction, or it can represent a call for help. In Don’t let me fall, for example, I stage a force that collects the fall, playing with the very idea of representation.
Daniele Spanò, “Still life”, 2025, travertine, 24k gold leaf, lead and mirror, 23 x 31 x 62 cm, courtesy of the artist
In the project, falling also seems like a gesture to slip away from dominant narratives. What does the fall represent for you?
The fall is intertwined with the image and with the relationship between video and mediated image. By mediated I mean filtered: today we live immersed in a hyper-exposure to visual information. I don’t take an ideological stance on digital hypertrophy; I simply observe that the paradigm of representation has changed. In the exhibition, some monitors look at each other, while others face the floor. It is a form of negating the image and questioning its function. In Self-Portrait, for instance, the digital body is held back by a physical element, revealing the tension between the real and the virtual.
Why did you choose to show the screens and their devices in their vulnerability? What does it mean to see the container rather than just the image?
The display is a physical object and at the same time a relational window. Showing it as a body makes visible the separation between the real and the virtual. In some works, such as Self-portrait, Double portrait or StilllLife, the screens are lifted by industrial straps and hydraulic cranes: their real weight is minimal, while their symbolic weight evokes the history of representation. These works dialogue with the three classical categories of representation and, through irony, highlight the tension between code and image.
Daniele Spanò, “Self-portrait”, 2025, hydraulic crane, 55” monitor, load strap, 2-minute video loop, 160 x 84 x 268 cm, courtesy of the artist
Images are described as ghosts. What do these ghosts represent for you?
I think of the ghost as a mystery, an image that manifests and retreats at the same time. In Almost still life I used the 19th-century Pepper’s Ghost technique, creating a hologram that lives between reflection and transparency. The image becomes light, an apparition moving through space as portrait or landscape: it slips away, yet precisely in doing so, it reveals itself.
Why is it important for you that visitors rely on what they cannot see?
The relationship with the viewer is crucial to me. Experiencing Let me fall requires trust, a gesture of sharing, a human relationship before an aesthetic one. What I ultimately seek is truth, not following a Calvinist precision, but as clarity. In Self-portrait and in the Double portrait of the two twins (two real twins, not a digital duplication) each figure has its own image and shadow. Even their reverberation is unique, indicating that what seems identical is not, and that the viewer can trust their own perception even within uncertainty.
Daniele Spanò, “Don’t let me fall, still life with a glimmer of hope”, 2025, bronze leaf, iron, LED light, travertine, 83.5 x 145.5 x 189, courtesy of the artist
How did you conceive the dialogue between screens, sculptures and devices? Did the exhibition space shape the project?
The works were created over the past two years and, initially, they were questioning me more than the opposite. My scenographic background taught me to let the space suggest relationships. The elements of the project are never isolated: there is always a suspended relation between them, a kind of shared breathing. Once this cohesion emerged, the installation took only a week.
How do light, sound and image intertwine in the project? Do they arise together or does one element lead the others?
I work in a cross-media way: the media exchange competencies. In Don’t let me fall, for instance, the light bar becomes a supporting element, an object stepping out of its comfort zone. The same applies on stage, where light not only illuminates but moves through space and interacts with it.
Daniele Spanò, “Double Portrait” (detail), 2025, hydraulic crane, two 55” monitors, load strap, 2-minute video loop, 160 x 84 x 268 cm, courtesy of the artist
Is there a common thread between this exhibition and your recent theatre work?
Not directly. In theatre, experimentation and processes are fundamental, as it is the work on large format and visuals. However, the synthesis between visual art and theatre differs from set design. The difference is clear, for example, in Andrea De Rosa’s Oedipus Rex: the construction of the space follows another logic, with a different approach to the relationship between elements and the viewer.
Chantal Gisi
Info:
Daniele Spanò. Let me fall
14/11/2025 – 24/01/2026
Sala 1 – Centro Internazionale d’Arte Contemporanea
Piazza di Porta San Giovanni 10, Roma
www.salauno.com
Chantal Gisi is a writer and translator, holding a Master’s degree in Modern European and American Languages and Literatures from Florence. For Juliet, she explores the connections between art, literature, and history, with a keen awareness of the present.
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